The Project Post Mortem (Evidence of Blood)
by Ellie 5192
Summary: "How such a feeble young body could even bear a child, let alone kill it in cold blood, was the first of many questions in Dora's mind." Dora/Kinley. WOP. Prompt-fic: 'Jackson and Dora, now a couple, investigate another crime in which someone has been wrongfully accused / convicted.'
_**The Project Post-Mortem**_

 _Written as a prompt fic for anonymous. Dora/Kinley. Warmings for mentions of: infanticide, murder, crime investigation._

 **Chapter 1: External Examination**

She was so young.

That was the first thought Dora had as she watched the woman walk into the room, shackles and handcuffs looking entirely like overkill on such a frail body. She was so young, no more than a hundred pounds, slim in a way that seemed sickly, her hair limp and her eyes rimmed with black; hooded like a retched and warped Betty Davis.

How such a feeble young body could even bear a child, let alone kill it in cold blood, was the first of many questions in Dora's mind.

She stood behind Kinley in the interview room, the young woman's file closed on the table in front of him, and Dora's arms folded as she leant against the back of Kinley's chair. She hadn't changed much since exonerating her father and learning the truth of her parentage; the hardness was still there, and the introversion. She still ran a bar alone, and mended the house as needed, and occasionally she remembered that she could call out for help if she needed a wrench out of reach.

She and Kinley… they were a unit now. He brought out the softness in her – the stillness and the quiet, without any of the loneliness. They loved each other fairly, and profoundly, and though their scars ran deep they were easier to bear with a partner that understood them. She was still getting used to being truly _known_ by a person; it was disconcerting, but nice all the same. She now knew that whatever her and Ray had, it wasn't love, not even from him. It was convenient, and comfortable. But it wasn't love.

They watched as the woman was lead to a chair and unshackled at the hands, her feet left in chains.

 _Where is she going to run_ , thought Dora, but remained silent.

And so, not for the first time, they introduced themselves to an alleged murderer and offered to hear her story.

* * *

"So Johanna, let's stop there and go back a bit…"

Kinley flicked through the pages of the file and stopped on a photocopy – _Certificate of Live Birth_. Dora hadn't seen it before – Kinley had started this investigation without her, using her as a sounding board in their kitchen before asking her here with him to talk to the girl. A woman's touch was probably his intention, though why he thought she of all women would inspire a gentle confession was beyond her; he of all people knew she was not a soft type. And he loved her for it still.

 _She was so small_ , thought Dora, looking over Kinley's shoulder and reading the details of the baby – five pound eleven, nineteen inches, name unspecified. It seemed cruel that a child who lived and breathed in the world for six whole weeks should be remembered by a single piece of paper reading _name unspecified_. It sent a chill running across her arms. The autopsy report was even more unsettling; _cause of death: asphyxiation by smothering, possible signs of compression._

Though raised the daughter of a murderer, Dora was not accustomed to facing the death of something so innocent; something so new to the world that they held no grudges, no debts, no retributions. Bloody murder seemed a far cry from what the state was accusing this young mother of doing.

Johanna looked up and saw the certificate, and the whisper of a smile crossed her face, as if remembering something not entirely unpleasant.

"I didn't even know I was pregnant at first" she said softly. Her Appalachian accent was thick, and Dora couldn't help but think she seemed very far from home being cooped up in a Connecticut prison. Kinley didn't pay attention to all that, focussing instead on the rapid and nervous movement of her eyes, the wringing of her hands in her lap below the table.

The girl could have been his daughter, if he'd had children back in his younger days.

"When I finally figured it out, it was too late to do nothin'"

He heard Dora take a soft breath from beside him. It was all still so raw, even after two years since the gruesome discovery of their joint past; the horrid way a young woman much like this one had died in the back room of a shack trying to escape a fate such as this. The very real possibility that this girl might have met the same fate if she'd made different choices.

"I guess I thought if I ignored it, it wasn't real"

"Did you try… anything?" asked Kinley, trying to remain delicate in a situation where no lightness existed.

"I didn't try to get rid of it" she said, shaking her head, finally meeting his eyes. "But I sure didn't take care of her"

And with that, quiet sobs wracked the girl's body, her shoulders shaking uncontrollably. Dora and Kinley both leaned back, knowing full well they wouldn't get much more information from the girl while she was in this state. But they listened anyway. Grief had a way of exposing someone's deeper thoughts; of letting down the wall just long enough to take a peak over and see what was hiding on the other side.

"I didn't kill her" she said through her tears. "I didn't kill her. When I left her in the crib she was breathing. She was breathing and I didn't do nothin', I swear I didn't-"

The crib, they both knew, was not made of hardwood, with safe rails and a warm crocheted quilt. It was a square draw from the bottom of a bureau, lined crudely with towels and blankets, resting on the floor next to the woman's own mattress. The rest of the room, at least according to the crime scene pictures, was empty; a small suitcase of clothes rested against the wall, and next to the mattress was a crate with a battery-operated lamp and a wind-up clock on top.

The room looked like the kind of place someone went in desperation, when they're trying to get away, and in many ways this girl was just that; a vagrant, a runaway, barely old enough to vote and already thrust into the hard slog of being an adult in poverty.

Not even enough money for a proper bed to rest her head at night.

The child, they knew, was buried in an unmarked pine box in the public lot of the local cemetery. Nobody else to claim her except the mother accused of taking her life.

Johanna's sobs quieted, and her eyes took on a quality that reminded Dora far too much of her former self – empty and void, deliberately aloof. It sent another chill crawling up her spine, and she hoped that Kinley could feel her calling out to him for his comfort and reassurance. She was still learning to accept what he offered her; still finding the balance between _clinging_ and _in love_. He was learning too, not to hold everything so close to the vest, but he was quicker to share than she was; more trusting of the world, if equally cynical about the people in it.

Under the table his hand reached over and for just a moment he squeezed her knee.

"I named her Shelby"

Dora looked back at Johanna, the tears on her cheeks making her seem smaller and more pathetic, and much, much younger. A part of her felt sorry for the girl – ached for her – but another deeper, harder part of her felt very little. That was the demon that lay dormant inside her; the creature of indifference; of the cold reality of too many mornings with an empty bed. It was fed for years on the patterns she had created for herself, made docile now in the wake of Kinley's patience and the enormity of what she felt for him despite herself. These day, though still present, it was satiated by the peace in her life and the resolution of her past.

More and more she stopped expecting to wake up one morning and find him gone.

"I named her after that lady in that movie, you know? That Magnolia movie"

Kinley nodded, encouraging Johanna to continue.

"My Mama and I used to watch that together when I was younger"

The girl sniffled, her eyes still hard, but the pain returned.

"I guess I thought Shelby was a strong name. But now I think about it, she died in that movie too, didn't she?"

* * *

"Do you trust her?" he asked, looking up and over his shoulder to where Dora was standing near his back. Her hand reached over and ran across his spine, over to rest in the hair at the nape of his neck, before running down again and sliding away. She looked at the door through which Johanna was just lead away, their first interview over.

"I don't know" she sighed, thoughtful in that way she often was, her eyes looking beyond their meagre surroundings. "I trust that she's in pain. But I don't know what kind of pain it is"

He nodded, aware of her movement as she sat in the chair beside him, the both of them examining the file again.

"She's so young" Dora whispered. Her shoulders hunched in the way they often did when she was trying to protect herself from an emotional blow. She reached into the file and by muscle memory withdrew the newspaper clipping from under the photocopy of the police autopsy report.

 _Infant Found Murdered in Derelict House. Mother in Police Custody_

The clipping gave basic information – the approximate age of the baby and the mother (six weeks and nineteen years respectively), a brief history of the house in which it was found (abandoned for being condemned, but not demolished; previous owners dead), and a single statement from the local Sheriff ("At this stage we are treating the situation with extreme suspicion"). Beyond those few facts it did little to illuminate why a meek young woman who lived not four blocks from a firehouse would murder her child – a child she had brought into the world and kept by her side for six weeks – rather than give her up safely and anonymously.

They had read the headline the morning the paper had come out and thought nothing of it, but as so often happens, Dora found Kinley pondering the details over his cup of coffee the next day. She had come to learn what to expect when he got like that.

" _People do all kinds of things at the most random of moments"_ she had said to him, running her hand through his hair as he held his arm around her hips. She didn't want to trivialise his work, but she also knew he could get caught so much in his own mind that he forgot that real people – and the world at large – were not the products of fiction that could be written to fit a pattern. She didn't want him sending himself into a mental spiral trying to make sense of a mystery.

But still. He'd kept an eye on the case. And when charges were laid against the young woman several days later, Dora watched as Kinley shook his head. She'd known it would be another of his hunts, and she couldn't blame him; looking at the end results it brought to her own life, she knew the power of having Jackson Kinley on her side. She admired his tenacity.

He told her it was good research for his next book. She called his bluff with a smile and came with him across state lines, leaving her new bar in the hands of her head barman for three days.

"I just can't figure…" he started, reading over the autopsy report again. "This cause of death… it sounds like she rolled on the baby in her sleep"

Dora hummed, nodding. She'd heard of that before. It was a sorrowful circumstance. Certainly it would be a reasonable explanation; a good defense if the girl had consulted with a lawyer before talking with the police. But she maintained that the baby never slept with her on the mattress – _people roll on 'em and kill 'em in their sleep_ – so given the girl's knowledge of such a circumstance it was immediately ruled out. Which left only foul play in its wake.

"The child was found in its bed" she answered.

"Right. And Johanna was down at the corner shop getting milk"

Kinley flicked over a page and read it again – the police statement and notes from the crime scene were not very detailed, given they had the supposed murderer in custody. The dictated notes from the attending officer's notebook were ambiguous – _Mother returned to scene. Shopping bag – milk – cigarettes – canned food. Agitated. Crying._ In a conversation with Kinley a younger officer said she'd seemed confused by the police presence, and kept asking for her baby. He said she'd seemed more distraught than agitated. He wouldn't go on record for any of his observations, just in case his superiors thought he was questioning their judgement, which he absolutely was not. Kinley couldn't fault the kid for it, and left it alone.

But still, the bias in the notes was puzzling.

"The police said she was planning to run away?" asked Dora, needing clarification while she was thinking. "But she'd already run away from home. And if she was going to leave, then why come back to the house?"

"With milk" added Kinley. He was stuck on that point. The milk was odd since there was no working electricity in the house and therefore no refrigeration. It had been a quart size; too much for one sitting and a single person. Had it been a pint maybe Kinley wouldn't have thought so long on it, but the store had plenty of stock and the baby drank from the breast; why would Johanna be carrying home more milk than she alone needed for a single day?

"And who knew to find the baby in the house while Johanna was out?" he added. "The house was abandoned – Johanna snuck in through a back window. As far as the neighbours knew it was empty"

All of this she had heard before, but he liked to run things out loud in case she had anything else to offer, so she let him be. It was his investigation, she was merely the ears. She spent her youth and many of her adult years looking into her own story, she didn't have the mental energy to take point and lead, and anyway, Kinley was just better at it than she was; more adept at seeing the big picture with his novelist's mind. She was better at data gathering and running a business.

"Let's go get lunch" she said quietly. What she really meant was _let's get out of here and talk about it somewhere sunny over a nice slice of pie_ , but Kinley understood what she meant all the same. He nodded at her and sighed, flipping the file closed. They rose from their seats and went to the door, finding it unlocked and unattended.

That was a good sign, as far as he was concerned. If the police didn't think much of them, they wouldn't work to hide anything. It had been his experience that suspicion was more of a hindrance than outright lies; lies had a way of unravelling themselves, but suspicion could linger on the skin long after the truth was found. He looked at Dora by his side and thought of all the rumours that still floated around their home town about their families, never truly resolved despite the article he published to the paper. Even after they'd told their story in full – eight glossy pages written by himself for the New Yorker; a controlled expose to put to bed any conjecture – the few that would be invested had passed to the next life, and many that were left simply didn't care. Now, of course, they were known more as _that writer and the lady with the bar_ , rather than by any connection to the Ellie Dinker murder scratched down in local folklore; but the suspicion long outlived the lies.

It was one of the few reasons they moved away from Sequoia in the finish, to an old home in upstate New York. Sequoia was too small to hold its own history, and stifled them where they stood. They visited now and then, to see friends or drink at Dora's old bar that was owned by a guy in town. It had been a cleansing process to move away, and Kinley had been keen to see Dora let go of the ghosts around her – sell her old family home filled with trouble, sell the bar where Horace Talbot still frequented. Start living her own life now she had found closure for her father.

They sold her home, her beloved bar, and Ray's house with any usable furniture (all left to Kinley, which surprised him), and they found a place together on the river just north of Poughkeepsie. Far away from anyone who knew them. Close enough to the city to keep life interesting.

Kinley ran his hand over Dora's back as they walked outside the front doors of the prison and she smiled at him. The chill of a Connecticut winter cut through them, but as they walked to the car it felt like a good day. Their motel wasn't far away; there was a restaurant across the street that made homemade pie and good coffee. The shining sun, reflecting happily off the snow and sleet, contrasted so much with the dull reality behind them, but they welcomed it. Too long living in shadows and secrets, they didn't hide anymore, least of all from each other.

He took her hand and she smiled at him, squeezing his fingers in response before they let go to get in the car.

… _to be continued…_


End file.
